Recently Kent Hovind’s International House of Lunacy offered to send out free DVDs to anyone who asked. So naturally, I had to take them up. Yesterday, it was delivered to my… let’s say “imaginary roommate”, with the oh-so-subtle name “Sevil Natas” (thanks to Fez for suggesting that).
I haven’t watched the DVD yet. But it came with bunch of ads for God and related products, including a CSE Ministries catalog. And that’s what I want to talk about. But I need to preface that with a bit of non-snark:
The insidious thing about HIV is that it doesn’t kill you. At least, not directly, by dissolving your cell walls or anything like that. Rather, it weakens your immune system. This makes your body less able to fight off HIV itself, and also leaves you vulnerable to other diseases. So what kills you is not AIDS per se, but something unrelated, that you normally would have been able to fight off easily.
I suspect that something similar goes on with woo: if you’re prone to hold one kind of irrational belief, then you’re probably prone to believing other kinds of irrational beliefs. If you don’t have the mental toolkit to recognize why astrology is bogus, then you might not recognize that dowsing or feng shui are also bogus.
But the thing about religion — certainly Christianity as it is widely practiced in the US and Europe — is that, like HIV, it actively attacks people’s mental defenses against bullshit, by teaching people that believing things without evidence is a virtue, or that religious ideas should be immune from criticism.
And now, on to the woo! Read More
From the office of the governor of Texas, Rick Perry:
WHEREAS, the state of Texas is in the midst of an exceptional drought, with some parts of the state receiving no significant rainfall for almost three months, matching rainfall deficit records dating back to the 1930s; …
NOW, THEREFORE, I, RICK PERRY, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas. I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on that day for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal and robust way of life.
Yup, magic. An elected official of a populous state in an allegedly advanced country is using his office to tell his constituents to use rain magic.
Notice that Perry’s proclamation, like a well-crafted ad for a magnetic bracelet or an herbal boner pill, tries to give the impression that the product works, without actually making any actionable claims:
WHEREAS, throughout our history, both as a state and as individuals, Texans have been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer; it seems right and fitting that the people of Texas should join together in prayer to humbly seek an end to this devastating drought and these dangerous wildfires;
Shorter Perry: “We have a drought, with the ensuing wildfires and crop failure. Here, have a pacifier!”
(Via ThinkProgress.)
The Washington Post has an of a type that’s all too common. It involves the Holy Sepulcher church in Jerusalem.
For those who don’t know the background, Holy Sepulcher is a church in Jerusalem that’s controlled by an alliance of six religious sects. And when I say “alliance”, I mean warring factions and an uneasy mix of all wanting to be at the same place, but hating each other’s guts. So over the centuries they’ve mapped out the church down to the inch to determine who controls which parts.
A ladder placed on a ledge over the entrance sometime in the 19th century, for example, has remained there ever since because of a disagreement over who has the authority to take it down.
So you know it’s going to be stupid. Epic stupid. An Iliad of stupid and an Odyssey of petty.
They won’t put in a fire exit.
Because everybody wants a fire exit (the church can hold thousands, but only has one door), but nobody wants to give up any space to put in the door.
The most likely location for an exit would require the agreement of the Greek Orthodox, Copts and Ethiopians. But wherever a new exit is located, one of the churches would have to cede part of the sacred space under its control. “I don’t know where they’re going to do it,” said Father Samuel Aghoyan, the senior Armenian priest at the church.
Adding a layer of political complexity, some of the space directly outside other potential exit points in the church walls is controlled by an Islamic religious body known as the Waqf, which does not recognize Israel’s control in Jerusalem and is therefore unlikely to cooperate.
This is what religion does to people: it divides them into in-group and out-group. Saved and unsaved, sheep and goats, faithful and infidel, us and them (just ask a Muslim in Israel, a Jew in Palestine, a Catholic or Protestant in Ireland, or anyone who’s tried to leave the Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons). Even if it doesn’t directly cause enmity between groups, it certainly encourages this sort of tribalism.
Grow the fuck up, people. This isn’t kindergarten. Lives are at stake.
Recently, BillDo farted the following onto the intertubes:
Moreover, Jenkins wrote that “Out of 100,000 priests active in the U.S. in this half-century, a cadre of just 149 individuals—one priest out of every 750—accounted for over a quarter of all allegations of clergy abuse.” In other words, almost all priests have never had anything to do with sexual molestation.
(italics in the original).
Just for comparison, the Wikipedia page for Crime in Detroit, Michigan, says that the murder rate there was 40.1 per 100,000 people in 2009.
Assuming that each murder was committed by a different person, this means that about one Detroiter out of every 2500 accounted for all of the murder in 2009. In other words, almost all Detroiters are not murderers.
So by BillDo’s reasoning, Detroit does not have a murder problem. Good to know. Presumably if I gave him a glass of water with only one part of arsenic in 750, he’d drink it.
You may want to save this post at Uncommon Descent, in case it disappears down the memory hole.
If you’ve been following Intelligent Design, you’ve probably run across William Dembski’s notion of Complex Specified Information, or CSI. Basically, the argument is that if a system has CSI above a certain level, then it was intentionally designed (just as “Wherefore art thou Romeo” exhibits design, while “Mp YuMsAAVVa UU MbMZlPVJryn Viw MfHyNA FHh” doesn’t). Living beings (or their genomes) have sufficiently-high CSI, and were therefore designed. QED.
So the question from day one has been, “so how exactly does one calculate CSI and get an actual number?” From what I’ve seen, the standard answer is “go read Dembski’s book”. None of my local libraries have Dembski’s book, but from the reviews I’ve read, I gather that for all his talk about CSI, he never gets around to sitting down and describing how to calculate it.
And now for some reason, the people at Chez Dembski have invited someone going by the name of MathGrrl (whom I guess to be a frequent commenter; I stopped reading the comments there a long time ago, so I don’t know) to write a guest post. And not only that, but one in which she basically asks, “so anyway, how does one calculate CSI?”.
The first fifty comments consist mostly of “Yeah, well, evolution doesn’t explain it!” and handwaving, followed by a bunch of comments from MathGrrl to individual commmenters, all “Yes, but that doesn’t help me calculate CSI.”
Which is odd: you’d think that the first dozen or so comments would be links to FAQs, and maybe some Mathematica code to do the calculation. But no. And it’s not because they’re too busy to answer MathGrrl’s question, since a lot of them go on at length about how she’s not asking the right questions, or not using CSI correctly, or maybe some other measure of complexity would be better suited. But I’m not seeing a whole lot of anything that looks like math.
The thread looks, to me, like a gaggle of astrologers arguing about the proper way to calculate a horoscope.
So once again, getting information out of creationists is like pulling teeth.
Update, Mar. 25, 2011: The 200-comment mark has been reached, and no definition in sight. In fact, comment #201, by PaV, says:
Dear MathGrrl:
To provide a “rigorous definition” of CSI in the case of any of those programs would require analyzing the programs in depth so as to develop a “chance hypothesis”. This would require hours and hours of study, thought, and analysis.
You come here and just simply “ask” that someone do this. Why? You do it.
In other words, “Math is hard! Develop our theory for us!”
(Update, Aug. 4: Fixed typo.)
The thing I like about the various e-book reader apps for [insert mobile computing device here[1]] is that they allow me to read the first chapter of most recently-published books, without all the bother of having to brush the Cheeto dust off my shirt, putting on pants, and emerge from my mom’s basement into the burning light of day to go to the library.
And so, when Denyse O’Leary, William Dembski’s official in charge of dispelling all positive stereotypes about Canada, recommended Rabbi Moshe Averick’s book Nonsense of the Highest Order: The Confused and Illusory World of the Atheist, I downloaded and read the sample chapter. Read More
So, remember the superstitious folks who think that Jesus will make his great comeback tour on May 21, 2011? Well, Ray Garton, during his recent interview on the Irreligiosophy podcast, had a simple but brilliant idea that I think deserves to be spread around:
If you have superstitious friends, family members, coworkers, etc. who believe in rapture twaddle; and if they know you’re an atheist, then on May 21, sneak out and leave a pile of clothes behind. Make them think you’ve been raptured.
The downside of this is that May 21, 2011 falls on a Saturday, so it won’t work with coworkers, unless you work Saturdays. But maybe you can come to dinner with your family, excuse yourself to go to the bathroom, change into spare clothes that you’ve stashed under the sink, and sneak out the window. Or something. Use your imagination.
Arguably, me posting this might give the game away, but I’m not too worried about that: the people who’ll be fooled by this trick won’t read this. They probably recoil from any atheist site as if they’d been burned with pornographic acid or something.
(And speaking of the May 21sters, here’s a shout-out to the Countdown to Backpedaling.)
(This was originally posted at Secular Perspectives.)
The Telegraph reports that the Archbishop of Canterbury wants Christians to argue their side more forcefully:
Clergy are to be urged to be more vocal in countering the arguments put forward by a more hard-line group of atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who have campaigned for a less tolerant attitude towards religion.
A report endorsed by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, warns that the Church faces a battle to prevent faith being seen as “a social problem” and says the next five years are set to be a period of “exceptional challenge”.
Dear Dr. Williams,
This seems as good a time as any to repeat what Christopher Hitchens wrote in the introduction to his anthology, The Portable Atheist:
A terrible thing has now happened to religion. Except in the places where it can still enforce itself by fear superimposed on ignorance, it has become one opinion among many. It is forced to compete in the free market of ideas and, even when it strives to retain the old advantage of inculcating its teachings into children (for reasons that are too obvious to need underlining), it has to stand up in open debate and submit to free inquiry.
I, for one, welcome better arguments from believers, and I suspect that many atheists and humanists do, too. But then, a lot of us argue ideas for fun and to get at the truth by knocking down bad ideas.
And the fact is that an awful lot of apologetics is of very low quality. You might be surprised at how often we’re offered Pascal’s wager, C.S. Lewis’s Liar, Lunatic, or Lord, arguments from ignorance, and even “you just have to have faith” come up. Evidently a lot of theists have no idea how comically weak these arguments are. If you could educate them, we’d appreciate it. Thank you.
Over the centuries, religion has erected a protective wall around itself: blasphemy laws, intimidation, social taboos against criticizing religion (often in the name of ecumenicalism), mean that religious ideas have been insulated from criticism for a long time. And as a result, many theists have very little experience defending their ideas against rational arguments. And now that atheists are speaking up, and things like free-speech laws prevent religions from silencing dissent, this fact is becoming more and more apparent.
But if I may, I’d like to offer some advice on arguing with atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens, as well as lesser luminaries like PZ Myers and Matt Dillahunty, and even rank-and-file atheists like myself.
The key is to realize that our commitment is to the truth, not to any given set of ideas, tenets, or dogmas.
Philosophers and scientists have done a lot of work in figuring out how to figure out what’s true, and how to avoid coming to incorrect conclusions. It is easy to find lists of logical fallacies. You may want to educate your coreligionists on these fallacies and how to avoid them, because people who rely on fallacious arguments will be called on it.
What we’re really looking for is arguments for the existence of a god that don’t fall apart under scrutiny. If you have such an argument, please present it. If you don’t have one (yet), then it would be nice if you could at least say so.
Secondly, when asked for reasons to believe that there are any gods, theists often reply by pointing out the good done by their churches. But of course that is a non sequitur: it may in fact be useful for people to believe in gods, souls, or reincarnation, but that doesn’t mean that those things actually exist. Please tell your coreligionists to make sure they’re not arguing the wrong topic, because they will be called on it.
I realize that it’s easy to see the above as concern trolling. Actually, it’s cockiness. I’m so confident that spirited, rational argumentation will bring us closer to the truth (and remember, my commitment is to truth, not to atheism) that I can afford to give the game away, as it were.
So bring it on. And may the best ideas win.
(Thanks to Shelley for forwarding the Telegraph article.)
Since tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, today’s Secular Bible Study is about the Song of Solomon.
And you thought there wasn’t any erotica in the Bible.
Anyway, my notes are here (and also Org-Mode format).